There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.
If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
> a problem with Stanford's definitions
Only if students aren't lying on their application.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
I'm glad you had no problem with "dumpster fuck".
You don’t have to return your shopping cart. You don’t have to donate to the collection plate. You don’t have to give a coworker recognition.
But when everyone has an adversarial “get mine” attitude the systems have to be changed. Instead of assuming good intent they have to enforce it. Enforcement is very expensive and very unpleasant. (For example, maybe you need to rent the shopping cart.)
Unfortunately enforcement is a self fulfilling cycle. When people see others cheating they feel they need to cheat just to not be left behind.
You may be from a culture where this is the norm. Reflect on its impact and how we would really like to avoid this.
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
That point is probably behind someone at Stanford.
Hey, if they stop using the money I donate to advertise that my neighbors are abominations in the eyes of God they can have my money again.
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
This is not in alignment with "equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources"
People claim those values but rarely actually follow them.
In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.
That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.
It isn't, but if I'm on the hiring end and I know you play games like this, I'm not hiring you. I can work with less competent folks much better.
All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system.
I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks.
Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.
(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)
HN itself and startup culture celebrate breaking the rules and laws to earn money. It is ok to break the law if you are rich enough. People here were defending gambling apps despite all the shady stuff they do just a few weeks ago.
The white collar crime was barely prosecuted before, now the DOJ is loosing even the ability to prosecute it. So, I think the effect you worry about already happened, long time ago.
It absolutely is a disability! The fact that it's easy to deal with it doesn't change that fact.
I would not find it credible that it has a real impact on education though.
Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.
This is not entirely their fault. Stanford is subject to Santa Clara County building regulations, and those tend not to be friendly to large university developments (or any large developments for that matter).
I vaguely recall the recent Escondido Graduate Village Residences (EVGR) construction taking a while to get through the regulatory pipeline.
The true underlying issue here is just that there is not enough quality housing for the number of students Stanford admits.
If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not:
1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations
2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties
3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!
The people in the twins were not happy - they hadn't asked for them.
I knew one person who dropped out in the first 3 months (for mental purposes), and that was someone who shared a room.
Some recent examples where large segments of the population did this are 1) with medical marijuana cards, which make weed legal to anyone willing to claim to have anxiety or difficulty sleeping, or 2) emotional support animals on airlines, where similarly one can claim anything to get a prescription that, if travelling with a pet, opts them out of the sometimes-fatal always-unpleasant cargo hold travel.
Plenty of people would call either of these cheating, but kind of like how "language is usage", so are morals in a society. If everyone is doing something that is available but "cheating", that society deems the result for people sufficiently valuable.
I'm not endorsing the specific behavior, but I am pointing out that if there's a "cheating" lever anyone can pull to improve their own situation, it will get pulled if people think it's justified.
There's plenty that do get pulled and plenty that don't. In the US, SNAP fraud is sufficiently close to nonexistant that you can't tell the difference in benefits provided. But fraud surrounding lying about medical conditions to get a medical marijuana card is universal and accepted.
The people we're talking about here are teenagers that are told "if you have an ADHD diagnosis you can ask for and get your own room". The sort of systems thinking you are describing is not generally done by your average fresh high school graduate. This is therefore a Stanford problem.
And frankly, with HN praising Uber, Tesla and the rest of SV constantly breaking laws and rules companies, again, those students are practically saints.
OP worried about this:
> Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.
Trump winning second time, the people who lead government and GOP, the critical mass thing already happened. There was no moral already among significant share of population. Trying to pearl clutch over students is almost funny in that context.
My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".
The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.
The point is that everyone who gets a single is super happy about it the same way that a drug addict is always happy when they get their drug of choice for free: of course it’s great. Of course it isn’t the best thing for you in the long run. I say this as someone who hated being in a double my first year and spent the next three in a single.
As far as I am concerned having apartments of 4-8 students where each has their own small room but shares a common space is ideal. But usually this is reserved for sophomore year and later.
Maybe the difference isn’t morality but accepted norms? Or maybe it’s that single room accommodation is possible now and it wasn’t then?
FWIW, just to be clear, I don’t think “manipulating, exploiting or scamming” are good things to do!
Trouble is, getting teenagers to accept and live by that isn't something that will pan out. Societies have been trying for millenia.
If your system built for teenagers relies on the social contract in this way, it's a bad system. People who are over a half decade from a fully developed brain aren't going to grasp this.
What disability accomodations do you think the parents are receiving?
That's not mentioned in the article. Is this your personal speculation or do you have something to support that claim? The article seems to make it clear that it is the students themselves getting these accommodations, so your claim is directly contradicting the article we're commenting on.
> why are we acting like stanford students are unaccountable teenagers
Well they're definitionally teenagers, and if you know of a way to make teenagers act en masse accountable to society's values, that would be a novel development in social human history going back to Ancient Greece. So barring that, we should treat the teenagers whose brains have not yet developed enough to grasp society-wide consequences for personal actions as such.
Maybe its fine for many extroverts, but forcing an introvert into a room with others is a great way to drive many people absolutely mental.
Uh yeah. Moral judgments are about personal beliefs